Americans for Truth about Homosexuality

Americans for Truth About Homosexuality’s Peter LaBarbera continued his discussion with Liberty University Law School’s Rena Lindevaldsen on Friday. The two revisited the topic of openly gay judges, specifically the Virginia prosecutor who was rejected from a judgeship simply because he was gay. That discrimination was ok, Lindevaldsen said, because “if you’re engaged in a lifestyle of immorality, whether that be a homosexual lifestyle or an adulterous relationship or fornication, that’s not the type of moral character that I believe should be someone who’s being appointed to become a judge”:

Lindevaldsen: I think we can equate this not only with the judiciary, but the same debate is taking place, you know, who we want to serve as our schoolteachers, for example. We want moral, upstanding individuals to serve as judges, and this debate’s taking place with schoolteachers too. So if you’re engaged in a lifestyle of immorality, whether that be a homosexual lifestyle or an adulterous relationship or fornication, that’s not the type of moral character that I believe should be someone who’s being appointed to become a judge.
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I think it goes to fit moral character and I think that the necessary qualification of any judicial appointment. And therefore it is relevant, based on your conduct, to judge and decide whether you should be allowed to sit in the judiciary.

Immediately after Lindevaldsen and LaBarbera made the case that gay judicial nominees should be defined by and excluded for their sexual orientation, they changed the rules when it came to another prominent example of an openly gay person in public life. Lindevaldsen and LaBarbera heaped scorn on gay rights activists who have had the nerve to call the late Sally Ride, who lived for 27 years with her same-sex partner, a gay pioneer. Emphasizing Ride’s sexual orientation, LaBarbera said -- expanding on a tweet from shortly after her death --would be like defining her as an alcoholic if she had a drinking problem:

LaBarbera: They’re always using opportunities to promote what their version of reality on homosexuality. And really quickly, Sally Ride, another great example. Sally Ride was the first female astronaut, the first…and she had many amazing accomplishments. Unfortunately she also fell into lesbianism and left her husband, she was married, she ended up living in a lesbian lifestyle. She was not public about it. Now gay activists, like Michelangelo Signorile, are using her homosexual, you know, the fact that she practiced the homosexual lifestyle, to say, ‘Hey, this is another gay hero.”

Kirkwood: She was a female astronaut, now she’s the ‘lesbian astronaut.’

LaBarbera: Now she’s the lesbian astronaut, and you better believe in textbooks like in California where they’re teaching gay history now, there’s going to be Sally Ride. So people are going to learn Sally Ride as a, and we’re going a bit over here, they’re going to learn Sally Ride, Rena, as a gay hero, even though she wasn’t even public about it in her life.

Lindevaldsen: Yeah, because they need to contort our history to show that we’ve accepted this all along and that it’s perfectly normal, and see you too can do this and become great things. And you can, you can accomplish things, but that’s not who she was, that doesn’t define who she was and what she accomplished.

LaBarbera: And Rena, I tweeted, and I knew this was going to get me in trouble, but I tweeted, ‘Did she have a drinking problem too?’ In my tweet, I said that she made great accomplishments. But she should not be, and I didn’t, of course she doesn’t, I don’t know if she had a drinking problem or not, but my point was the fact that she practiced homosexuality would be about as relevant as saying, ‘Sally Ride, hey people who drink can be great.’ I mean it’s still immoral behavior, it’s very sad to me that she was involved in that lifestyle. The fact that she was in that lifestyle doesn’t take away from the great accomplishments that she had. But the point is gay identity politics now wants to seize her as a hero.

Peter LaBarbera was the guest on Michael Brown's "Line of Fire" radio program yesterday where the two discussed Dan Savage's recent appearance at the National High School Journalism Conference where he offended some students by criticizing the Bible and then mocked those walked out, for which he has since apologized.

Brown and LaBarbera spent most of the interview complaining that they are called bigots simply for attempting to help gays out of love while Savage is given lucrative speaking engagements even though he is an anti-Christian bigot and hater. 

After an excruciatingly dull hour of that, the two moved on to other topics, offering LaBarbera an opportunity to vent that President Obama has "turned the United States into a huge gay-rights government.":

Nowadays, I think the big threat we see now - it's just incredible, Mike - the Obama administration has turned the United States into a huge gay-rights government. We are using our resources to force every government across the world, pushing them to promote homosexuality. And there's lots of government and states, whether they're Muslim or like ardently Christian nations like Uganda that don't want, they don't share the caviler attitude of the West toward homosexuality, they certainly don't want to promote it. And all of a sudden Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have turned the United States into a pro-homosexual regime and it's just despicable.

A few weeks ago, vandals threw bricks through the windows of the site hosting an Americans For Truth About Homosexuality banquet demanding that the anti-gay event be shut down. Ever since, AFTAH's Peter LaBarbera and Liberty Counsel's Matt Barber have been running around screaming "hate crime" and telling the story to anyone who will listen. 

So it was no surprise to see that it was also the topic of discussion on Liberty Counsel's "Faith and Freedom" program today, though it was a surprise to see Barber start asserting that not only were windows broken at the event site, but that those responsible also broke into the building and destroyed plumbing and flooded floors.

But that was nothing to compare to where the discussion went after that, when Mat Staver declared that this sort of vandalism was totally predictable because as gays get more rights, they become more hostile and violent and then declaring that when the Southern Poverty Law Center labels anti-gay groups as "hate groups," they are doing just what the Nazis did to the Jews:

Staver: This aggressive homosexual agenda is not about tolerance, it's about dominance. And the more emboldened they get, the more laws that they get, the more vocal they become, the more hostile they become, the more aggressive they become, and the more violent, in this particular case, they become.

Barber: Americans for Truth, as well as Liberty Counsel for that matter, is one of those flashpoints, they have been unfairly labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hard left-wing extremist organization that uses smears in order to label Christian organizations that take a principled stand on the biblical model of sexual morality in love, speak God's truth in love, they label them hate groups. But really, they are fanning the flames of this kind of violence with their rhetoric, by labeling organizations a hate group. And they're partly responsible for this, indirectly, I'm not going to say they're directly responsible ...

Staver: Well, when you go out and label somebody a hate group you think of the KKK ...

Barber: It emboldens these people ...

Staver: It also, it begins, you know, it's the same thing that happened in the Nazi Holocaust where they start to just demonize and stigmatize and then at some point in time you don't even think that someone's human and then, you know, we look at it and our consciences are shocked but if you look at how it ultimately began where they began to just demonize and dehumanize them, that's what's happening with this labeling of hate groups.

Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality had as his guest today Chicago pastor and radio show host John Kirkwood. While speaking with LaBarbera, Kirkwood likened gays and lesbians to heroin users and said that supporting gay rights is similar to encouraging a drug addict. Kirkwood also attacked “the Lady Gaga theology that you were born that way” and said people who believe that are “rejecting God” and “rejecting the Bible.”

Listen:

Kirkwood: So when Christians start buying into the Lady Gaga theology that you were born that way, they’re rejecting Paul, they’re rejecting God, they’re rejecting the Bible, they’re rejecting the offer of redemption through the shed blood of Jesus Christ. And so it’s a larger issue to me than simply traditional marriage versus same-sex marriage.

LaBarbera: Absolutely.

Kirkwood: It’s an affront to the most holy God. And God says, listen, here’s the thing that’s crazy, if your son was a heroin addict Peter, and you found out people were encouraging him in that behavior, that would be an enemy to you. You don’t want people to give him needles, even if they’re clean needles, you don’t want him to be applauded in that behavior because that behavior’s going to lead to destruction. You want somebody to be able to say to him 'listen God’s got a better way, you can be freed of this bondage.' And yet we don’t do this with homosexuality, or we’re scared to do this with homosexuality, when God told us that the end is destruction?

LaBarbera: He calls it an abomination.

Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality appeared yesterday on The Janet Mefferd Show, where he fretted about the rise of the gay rights movement. “This is one of the most successful American power campaigns that has ever existed,” LaBarbera lamented. “Consider in sixty years they went from being an aberrant, taboo lifestyle, which was ‘don’t even mention it,’ to now driving society.” He told Mefferd that because the “gay mafia” controls Hollywood and the media, even right-wing author Ann Coulter no longer associates “homosexual activists” with the “liberal mob.” After condemning the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and discussing the impact of HIV-AIDS in the gay community, LaBarbera grieved that the government was “promoting” instead of suppressing “this unhealthy behavior”:

LaBarbera: You know I’m trying to get Christians to understand, look, it’s not about tolerance anymore; it’s about celebrating homosexuality.

Mefferd: Right, well we saw that just this week with the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. It was one side of the story, everybody was in the streets rejoicing, everybody was happy, all the sudden the sun has come out, completely ignoring the fact that there were plenty of Americans who were grieving that particular decision.

LaBarbera: Absolutely Janet, that was so sad to see. I was looking at our Chicago Sun Times, two full pages celebrating the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal. The media now pretends that there is no other side in this issue and we have to work around that. But the homosexuals are sort of knowing that they have the media with them, are trying all these techniques, and the gay activists are sending me taunting messages, ‘you’re next Peter!’ This is how bad it is. People don’t understand; we don’t use the term ‘homo-fascism’ lightly.

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The CDC just reported that 2 percent of men who have sex with men are responsible for 61 percent of AIDS cases, if it were any other behavior in this culture, wouldn’t we see a mobilization by governments state, local, federal, by private organizations, everybody would be saying, ‘we have to stop this unhealthy behavior.’ But in homosexuality it’s the opposite, we’re actually promoting the very behavior that’s killing people.

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It’s a hateful thing to say Peter LaBarbera, Janet Mefferd, these Christians are hateful, that in it of itself is raw bigotry and hatred. Total dominance is what they’re after. It’s not about tolerance it’s about dominance. Yes they’re on a march. This is one of the most successful American power campaigns that has ever existed. Consider in sixty years they went from being an aberrant, taboo lifestyle, which was ‘don’t even mention it,’ to now driving society. Even Ann Coulter is bending to the gay lobby, she joined GOProud, she wrote a book called ‘Demonic’ and it’s about the mob, the liberal mob, and guess which group she happened to leave out? The homosexual activists, who rose to power through a riot in Stonewall, they fought the cops; they threw bottles at the police. If there’s not a gay mafia that controls Hollywood and the media, even the liberals talk about the gay mafia now it’s that powerful, and yet Ann Coulter of all people left it out of the book, because she knew it might threaten her prominence in the media.

Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber has been talking a lot lately about his attendance at a conference put on by B4U-ACT, a group that wants the American Psychiatric Association to drop pedophilia from its list of disorders. B4U-ACT is a tiny, marginal group, and the APA has no plans to de-list pedophilia, but Barber claims the group is part of a larger “sexual anarchy movement” including feminists, gays and lesbians, and proponents of comprehensive sex education. Essentially, Barber’s argument is that since homosexuality has lost its stigma, pedophilia will soon become normalized too.

In an interview this week, he told Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality that the “sexual anarchist movement is the big umbrella and under that umbrella you’ve got the pedophile movement, you have the homosexual activist movement, you have your radical feminists and your pro-aborts and the abortion industry, Planned Parenthood and so forth, they’re all part of that sexual anarchy movement.”

LaBarbera and Barber go on to argue that many people become gay because they were molested as children, calling it the reason why out CNN anchorman Don Lemon is gay. LaBarbera said, “I want to tell him Don, you are not gay, I don’t believe in inherent gayness but even if I did, you are not gay, you are the victim of a predator.”

Barber writes today in WorldNetDaily that feminism and gays and lesbians will open the doors for those who “literally rape children”:

Make no mistake: Children are the target of what I call the "sexual anarchy movement." Whether it's the movement's pedophile wing that seeks to literally rape children, or its radical pro-abortion, homosexualist and feminist wings, which seek to rape the minds of children, the larger sexual anarchy movement has a shared goal: Attack, corrupt and destroy God's design for human sexuality. Children are just collateral damage.

Sexual anarchists know that to own the future, they must own the minds of our children. Hence, groups like B4U-ACT, GLSEN (The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network), Planned Parenthood and the like utilize academia from pre-school to post-graduate to brainwash and indoctrinate. Still, sexual anarchists are not restricted to the world of not-for-profit perversion advocacy. They also permeate the Obama administration.

Consider, for instance, that the official website for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently linked to "parenting tips" that referenced children as "sexual beings" and suggested that they should experiment with homosexuality and masturbation.

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Bolstered by support from the National Education Association, GLSEN has access to your children through sex education curricula it provides thousands of public schools across the country, and via adult sponsored "Gay Straight Alliances," hosted in those same schools.

Alas, we live in a post-Kinsey America wherein our culture, along with our Judeo-Christian heritage, rots in the heat of the day. The stench of sexual anarchy is masked by the soaring, disingenuous rhetoric of "tolerance," "diversity" and "comprehensive sex education."

Since the Charity Give Back Group was forced to defend its financing of right-wing organizations like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, spokesman Kevin McCullough (who himself has propagated virulent anti-gay rhetoric) has stated that the campaign to have companies withdraw from the CGBG represents bullying. Tony Perkins, the president of the FRC, even said it was an attempt to “censor” Christians. After Apple dropped out of the CGBG, which was previously known as the Christian Values Network, McCullough told The Christian Post, “We're not asking Apple to embrace our position or the other side's position. We just want them to stay neutral,” and the FRC is calling on activists to tell companies to “remain neutral in the current cultural battles.”

But by indirectly assisting the FRC and Focus on the Family, two of the major ‘culture war’ players, companies listed in the CGBG’s virtual mall are inadvertently finding themselves anything but ‘neutral’ parties. Both groups are heavily involved in the electoral politics and lobbying, which makes it difficult to consider them purely charitable organizations. FRC is one of the most prominent Religious Right advocacy groups in Washington D.C., and Focus on the Family has a policy arm (CitizenLink) dedicated to political activism. If companies really wanted to ‘remain neutral in the current cultural battles,’ that is more reason to drop out of the CGBG’s list.

While FRC and Focus have received the most attention, another group listed as an affiliated organization is Liberty Counsel.

Liberty Counsel is a sister organization of Liberty University and Liberty Action, part of the network established by the late Jerry Falwell. Liberty Counsel’s Liberty Alerts depict their legal victories as “Gaining Ground in the Culture War,” and the head of Liberty Counsel, Mat Staver, wrote a book called Take Back America that he descried a Liberty Action flyer called “an Invaluable Resource to Help Win the Intensifying Culture War!” Staver’s deputy at Liberty Counsel Matt Barber even described liberalism as “hatred for God” and demanded President Obama’s impeachment for providing family benefits to federal employees in domestic partnerships. Most recently, they defended Lisa Miller, who kidnapped her daughter and fled the country to escape a court order granting her former partner custody of the child, and the Florida teacher who used his Facebook to post anti-gay messages. Like FRC and Focus, Liberty Counsel consistently propagates the most stringent anti-gay rhetoric.

Barber has argued that marriage equality is “rebellion against God,” held that gay and lesbian youth who commit suicide do it because they intuitively know homosexuality is “immoral” and called anti-bullying programs part of a “a homosexual activist political indoctrination agenda.” Such anti-gay rhetoric is extremely similar to that used of the FRC and Focus. The FRC’s Perkins claimed that homosexuality is “man shaking his fist in the face of God” and said that gay and lesbian children are likely to commit suicide because they “recognize intuitively that their same-sex attractions are abnormal.” Focus on the Family led the push against anti-bullying programs across the country, calling them efforts “to promote homosexuality to kids.”

Liberty Counsel and the FRC also defended Malawi’s law that criminalizes homosexuality and attacked American efforts to alter it.

Despite right-wing criticisms of the pressure campaign on companies tied to the CGBG, Liberty Counsel launched their own pressure campaign against schools that allowed students to participate in the ‘Day of Silence,’ which protested anti-gay bullying. Liberty Counsel also conducts an annual campaign against companies that they believe are supposedly undermining Christians, and Staver calls on customers to “shop elsewhere” if the store is not seen as sufficiently respectful of Christmas.

Liberty Counsel even joined forces with the militantly anti-gay Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, Illinois Family Institute, and the American Family Association to launch a boycott and pressure campaign against McDonalds after it made a donation to the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. Barber lashed out at McDonalds for working with “militant homosexual activists” in front of their company headquarters.

Who else supported the boycott and pressure campaign against McDonalds?

Why, none other than the Family Research Council, which supported the boycott against McDonalds and lauded “McDonald’s agreement to stop financing the homosexual agenda.”

Now, will FRC and its allies please stop complaining that pressure campaigns against companies represent “discrimination” and the undue influence of ‘cultural battles’ into the corporate world? Probably not.

When the Chicago Cubs made an It Gets Better video to send an anti-bullying, anti-suicide message, Peter LaBarbera of the Illinois-based Americans for Truth About Homosexuality was unsurprisingly outraged. Already numerous Religious Right groups such as the American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission and Mission America have condemned the It Gets Better project, which works to prevent suicide particularly among LGBT youth, and now LaBarbera wants to tell LGBT youth: “it doesn’t get better.” The anti-gay activist tells WorldNetDaily that baseball teams like the Cubs “are using that stature to encourage kids to practice an immoral and destructive behavior”:

Peter LaBarbera, president of the ministry Americans for Truth, told WND the slogan may sound nice, but it "doesn't match the reality." "It doesn't get better. … There are not just the physical complications. We can't ignore the biblical reality that we're dealing with eternal judgment," he said.

"Whether they like it or not, professional athletes are role models for young men and now many yong women. They basically are using that stature to encourage kids to practice an immoral and destructive behavior."

He said the other complications are that baseball, previously associated with wholesomeness and competition, now is "rushing headlong into the embrace of immorality."

"Think of all these kids, with their sports heroes telling them it's okay to be gay, with no connection to the reality. They're all caught up in pretend propaganda that has no relationship to the lifestyle," said LaBarbera, whose ministry is in the Chicago area.

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LaBarbara said he's already heard complaints about the campaign from traditional families, who plan to no longer patronize the Cubs.

On Monday, Right Wing Watch reported on Matt Barber’s claim that the disproportionately high rate of suicide among gay youth was because “kids who are engaging in homosexual behavior often look inward and know that what they are doing is unnatural, is wrong, is immoral, and so they become depressed and the instances of suicide can rise.”

Barber, Liberty Counsel’s Director of Cultural Affairs and an Associate Dean of the Liberty University School of Law, spoke to Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, who has used his radio show to blast anti-bullying programs, about how his comments have sparked an uproar. He argues that “homosexual activists and other ‘progressives’ in the pro-sin movement” don’t have a “gripe” with him, as “their problem is with their Creator.” Barber went on to attack “anti-Christ activists” for purportedly “hijacking” the bullying crisis to advance their “radical pro-homosexual, anti-Christian agenda.” Adding, “Scripture warns that ‘the wages of sin is death.’ Homosexual behavior is demonstrably destructive physically, emotionally and spiritually”:

You know, scripture says ‘woe to those who call evil good and good evil.’ When homosexual activists and other ‘progressives’ in the pro-sin movement are exposed to biblical truth, their reaction is invariably visceral and loud. There’s ‘nothing new under the sun.’ This ‘kill the messenger’ strategy is age-old and knee-jerk. These folks, as a matter of course, call evil good and good evil. Of course their gripe isn’t with me. I’m nothing. I’m nobody. Their problem is with their Creator, the natural order and the fallen state of mankind. They’re just lost.

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Right, as you know I’ve never been one to mince words or sugarcoat things. That’s how God hardwired me. I also shared my opinion that many of those caught-up in the homosexual lifestyle intuitively know that such conduct is sin – that it’s both immoral and unnatural behavior. Objective truth is objective truth. God has written His laws on the hearts of every man, woman and child. We’re all spiritual beings created in the image of our sovereign Lord. We are also all sinners. Scripture says that not one of us is righteous. When we sin, we create separation between ourselves and God.

God’s word also says that when we sin sexually, it’s particularly egregious because our bodies are the temple of Christ. This separation from God – a natural result of sexual sin – can lead to depression and even despair. It’s a no brainer. I pointed out that such despair and inner conflict can logically be one factor that might contribute to teen suicide. It’s absolutely heartbreaking to witness, but it’s a very painful reality.

Scripture warns that ‘the wages of sin is death.’ Homosexual behavior is demonstrably destructive physically, emotionally and spiritually. The answer is never to take one’s own life. Life is God’s alone to give and to take away. The answer is to repent, make every effort to stop sinning and to find Life.